The Forbidden Forest
by WildeAquarius
Summary: "Yes, Arthur, cars. Imagine a wizard buying a rusty old car and telling his wife all he wanted to do with it was take it apart to see how it worked, while really he was enchanting it to make it fly." The Adventures of The Flying Ford Anglia - Oneshot -


The Forbidden Forest

Leaves tore off braches, leaving bare finger like sticks of wood to grab and scratch him as he followed his own headlights through thicket after thicket with no destination in mind, he only wanted away.

Freedom, he thought to himself as images of previous human owners played across his windshield like a drive-in movie montage. The teenage girl, his first owner when he was brand spanking new, his bight turquoise paint job shining under the lights on the show room floor. She never liked him, thought she deserved a fancier, more expensive car than he. Allowing his doors to smack into anything she had parked to close to, and reversing without really paying attention, she'd dented his bumper into many fire hydrants. She ignored his flashing warnings, until his oil ran thick and muddy in his tubes and his belts dried and split. He'd given up one afternoon, pulling to the side of the road coughing through the fluids spraying his engine and sputtering heaps of black smoke out his tail pipe in hopes that she would give him up as a bad job.

He'd been relieved when he'd been sold to the young man; the one who had parked him in a clean driveway in front of a small house with a well cared for lawn. Weekends were spent with his hood up, the sun beating down through his windshield and warming his seats. This man took care of him, washing him with warm soapy water, and applying a slippery coat of wax that felt so wonderful he beamed like a diamond in the sunshine. The young man changed the old oil for new, filled him wonderful petrol and bought him new belts. This was the life, he thought to himself as he roared back to life under the man's gentle turning of the key and mumbled prayer. He'd been imagining long drives in the country and week long trips to the shore. Those dreams shattered one morning when he saw the man carrying a car seat toward him, and felt the thud as it landed in his back seat. The child came out then, painfully jerking open his back door and climbed into the seat, stepping on the cushion with hard soled shoes. He'd felt a longing for the man, or even the teenage girl, as a woman got in behind his steering wheel and jammed the key into him, grinding his gears in the process.

He'd been with them for a year, putting up with a piece of chewing gum stuck between the cushions of his back seat that he could not seem to dislodge, lipstick stained tissues and candy wrappers littering his floorboards, the horrid stench of fake pine radiated off of something hanging from his rear view mirror, when he'd begun to feel the difference in the weight in his front seat, and it seemed to increase every month for about a year, when he'd seen a second, smaller car seat headed toward his back door. This time, he exhaled the air out of his tires, had one wiper twitching constantly, and, since it had worked before, pulled off to the side of the road chugging and gurgling. And, just for good measure, he'd let go of his gas tank this time, spilling out the cheap petrol the woman had given him into a pool on the black top.

Two weeks later, a tall balding man was looking at him. Gently lifting his hood and touching his plugs and battery with soothing hands. The balding man nervously spoke to the man who had once lovingly repaired him and now looked at him with betrayed eyes. Then two men shook hands, and they exchanged money for his keys between them.

He spent a month hidden behind a chicken coop, and while he could occasionally hear the sound of children's voices and shouts of laughter, but none of them ever came to see him. The balding man studied him with something like awe as he ran graceful hands over his engine and undercarriage. Then, one sunny afternoon that made him long for warm sudsy water, the balding man had taken a stick out of his pocket and pointed it at him, said something that sounded like "_Reparo_" and a kind of icy warmth spread over him, from his headlights to his back bumper. His insides grew, the seats spreading and puffing back up. His battery was quiet suddenly fully charged, all four tires filled with air to showroom capacity, grungy oil became sleek and glossy as it pulsed through him.

That was when he'd learned of the existence of magic.

It was a wonderful life after that. He was washed twice a month, given high quality petrol and his oil was changed regularly. And he learned how to _fly_. He loved it up there, racing across the sky, no train tracks to worry over, no potholes or pedestrians to avoid. Nothing but blue sky, air breezing through his engine and only the occasional bird to steer around. It was wonderful.

Until that night.

He was woken suddenly by hushed, whispering voices of three boys. He'd seen them before, as they'd come to stare him and sometimes giggle at the balding man, but they'd never bothered him, never had climbed inside. But this time they did, and suddenly, his engine was roaring and they were flying. Well, flying was alright, even if the boy behind the wheel had very little idea on how to operate a car. And he didn't really even mind having to hover next to that window, or when his back door was slammed shut amidst all the screaming and hollering, it felt, somehow, like a rescue mission. Like he was a hero.

It was a let down then, when he was driven the normal way a little while later. He knew the roads well, had driven them many times with the teenage girl and then the woman with the child and his kicking him with hard soled shoes. He was parked, and was taking a well deserved nap and dreaming of flying, when the two youngest boys were back and they were in the air again.

Nearly hitting the train wasn't fun, no fun at all, and the boy behind the wheel had less of an idea on how to drive properly than his brother had had. And crashing into the tree was mortifying, simply mortifying, no self respecting car would ever be caught in the top of a tree.

And so here he was, on his own for the first time ever, braches of cruel trees thrashing out at him as if he were a fugitive, as if it had been his fault he'd fallen from the sky on and into one of them. Deer and unicorns dashed across his beam of headlights, out of and in to trees, getting out of his way. Two creatures that looked like monstrous chickens squawked and thrashed out at him as he speed by. He'd drive himself further in then; maybe he could find someone to wash him down with warm soapy water.

He drove and drove, tires slipping occasionally of a patch of wet leaves or in a muddy puddle. He came at last to a precipice. A great hollow lay beneath where trees were gone and stars shone brightly down, and from his vantage, he could see into it.

The spiders had been a surprise. He'd never seen so many spiders all in one place. He had, of course, seen one or two here and there, he'd been in garages to often not to have. He'd even seen several spiders behind the chicken coop as they crept in and out of the broom cupboard. But not this many. There had to be hundreds of them. Hundreds! And of all sizes. No, he thought as he pulled his lever into reverse and slowly backed away, he would avoid this place.

Several months later, he'd long given up hope of being clean ever again when he'd heard two familiar voices. It wasn't the very large man who traipsed into the forest to visit the largest spider, no, it was two other voices, smaller somehow, and … familiar. Yes, he had heard these voices before. Ah, yes, of course, it was the two boys, the two that had nearly flown him into the train, and then crashed him into the tree instead. What were they doing out here? And with a dog, too?

He followed the voices; saw them almost engulfed by the heard of spiders, and acted without thinking. With his accelerator all the way down, he switched on his headlights, they shone in the dark as he plunged through the trees (and they had just begun to forgive him too) and down the hill. Some of the smaller spiders scattered, larger ones flipped over onto their backs, legs flailing in the air. He sounded his horn, again and again, blasting it through the night air.

His brakes squealed with the effort, but he came to a stop and threw open his doors, allowing the boys to scramble inside. The dog in the back seat kept howling, but he paid it no mind, this was not the time to be particular.

He sped back to the forest, climbing the hill, breaching even more trees; one of them got him back by breaking off his side mirror. Enough was enough for goodness sake. He forced his accelerator down even further and when the trees thinned and he hadn't seen a spider in a while, he slammed his breaks. The dog was out first, then the boys. One of them patted him in thank you. Then he was off again, back to the forest.

A year later, he had made the acquaintance with a couple of unicorns and after many scratches to his paint, and a puncture to one tire, he'd learned to avoid the heard of hippogriffs, who did not and would never, trust him. He had even figured out that if he drove himself into the lake, he could wash himself nearly as well as either of the men had. The water was cold, and there was no soap, but he'd come to peace with the idea that well enough was well enough.

He was parked on the edge of the lake one starry night, wipers flicking lake water off his windshield, and enjoying the hum of the crickets when the rustling of leaves startled him. A dog, who wasn't a quite dog and a cat, who wasn't just a cat, came into view. Together, the large black dog and the orange cat padded to the edge of the lake and drank deeply for a few moments, when suddenly, with barks that sounded like laughter, the dog jumped in to the water, sending out swirls of rings and splashing the cat. In a streak of orange the cat fled, back into the forest and out of sight. He watched the dog paddle in the water, snapping his teeth at the merpeople and playing a kind of hide and seek with the giant squid, until it bored him, and he rolled quietly away.

A few weeks later a tremendous noise roused him. The creatures of the forest were in turmoil. Birds swooped around their nests, spiders scurried across fallen leaves, rats, unicorns and hippogriffs scampered away. Even the three headed dog ran past him, his tail between his legs. But it was the hasty retreat of the centaurs that scared him the most. He followed them, deeper into the woods, not knowing what they were running from, but not caring either. If something could scare the three headed dog and the centaurs, that was good enough for him, and he sent his tires spinning. He was halfway to the lake when he heard the werewolf's howl and he quickly decided that a bit of rust in exchange for spending the night safely under the water wasn't a bad proposition.

He'd seen children in the forest before, but there were more of them this autumn, wearing different colored cloaks to shield them from the new nip in the air. And they spoke in different languages, words he could not understand. As the trees lost their leaves and snow fell, covering him and the ground in a thick icy white and freezing the petrol he had left, there was only the occasional student, usually chasing a loose piece of parchment captured by the wind, or hunting a glimpse of the three headed dog. He was grateful when the snow melted and grass began to grow again, and new leaves sprouted, shading the forest floor from the sun, growing in warmth.

It was on one of those spring evenings, just after dark had fallen that he heard the thudding of footsteps in the leaves. Slow moving, intermediate steps accompanied by heaving breathing. He rolled his tires forward to investigate, but saw no one there. Turning his steering wheel all the way to the right, he spun round in a slow circle, and still, saw no one. The footsteps stopped, but the heavy, gasping breaths continued. Then, quite suddenly, out of the corner of his windshield, he saw the body of a man fall to the forest floor out of no where. He steered himself into a turn; the leaves and gravel crunching quietly under his tires, and with a flourish, another man appeared from the thin air, a terribly broken man revealing himself from under some kind of slippery looking cloth that now dangled from one hand. There was silence in the forest, all the creatures had stopped moving, even the wind seemed to hold its peace and stopped blowing through the leaves over the trees towering above. The only sound to be heard were the heavy breaths from the standing man, and even they were quieting down. The broken man stared down at the still man lying on the forest floor for several moments before he took that slippery cloth and tossed it down, and the man on the ground disappeared. The broken man stomped away, laughing.

The thestrals frightened him at first. He'd been in the forest for three years, occasionally hearing their high pitched cries, and seeing them once or twice looping lzay circles in the sky. It was his longing to fly again that urged him to the edge of their clearing. He watched them from the under the cover of the trees for several days before he approached. They weren't really frightening at all, he realized. Just like horses, but horses that could fly. A feeling of kindred spirit over took him, for he too was like that. A kind of car, but one that could fly. Oh, how wonderful it would be if he could take to the air again.

The entire herd stopped and held quiet still when he drove out from the trees. His tires tracked mud onto the floor of their clearing, and he wished he had thought to make a quick trip to the lake to bathe before he'd showed himself. But to late now, they were all watching him. He rolled slowly toward them, wondering if he should just take flight and hope they would follow, when the earth shook, was still for a moment, then shook again. The thestrals ran for the cover of the trees, and he began to take heed and follow when he felt something grab him from above and suddenly he felt weight on his roof, and a pinching against his doors, and he was no longer on the ground. He was flying again, swooping through the air, being lifted. Up he went, and then came to a sudden stop and found his headlights pointing into the eyes of a man. No, wait, that wasn't possible. He looked down; he must be sixteen feet off the ground. This was a largest man he'd ever seen, larger by far than the scraggily man who visited the spiders. He swooped through the air, fingers gripping tightly, his tires spinning needlessly as the giant of a man lunged him back and forth then plucked at his windshield wipers. He tooted his horn in frightened blasts; puffs of greasy smoke escaped his tailpipe.

A woman screamed from somewhere below, deeper in the forest and he felt the grip of the fingers slacken, and he was falling. The crash came quite quickly, his roof dented, his tires deflated and one windshield wiper was gone, as was his other side mirror. He lurched into the forest and out of sight.

Two years later, he heard that awful, high pitched voice booming across the sky and through the trees. He didn't understand what the words meant, but the centaurs did, he could tell. They darted past him; racing toward the hill that he knew would give them a better view of the castle. He followed.

Wobbling on four flat tires, he made it to the edge of a small clearing but it took him hours. Grand streaks of light lit up the sky startling him; screams of fright and cries of pain mingled with dark evil laughter and roars of triumph. Great blazes of orange and red filled the dark sky.

He had just stopped to rest when the sound of footsteps on gravel came to him. A boy stepped into the clearing, staring at something in his hand. Was it? Could it be? That same boy? No, it couldn't be, could it? Not the one whose window he had hovered in front of, feeling like a hero? Not the same one who had patted him gently in thanks after the run in with the spiders. Was it possible? He watched as the boy closed his eyes and four shimmering figures appeared from nowhere. They spoke quietly to each other, and after a few moments, the boy walked on, deeper into the forest.

He tried to follow, but his tires were completely flat now, his battery almost drained, his petrol gone. Rust ate away at his once beautiful turquoise paint, and all the glass of his windows had been cracked and fallen away.

He thought of the boy. He thought of thestrals and spiders and dogs. Of centaurs and trees and warm soapy water. He thought of feeling like a hero.

**The End**

**a/n: Thank you for reading**


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